“Would you drink a cup of pesticides? What about a cup of chemical water? All your aquarium fish will die within a matter of minutes if you add tap water to your fish tank without also adding a de-chlorinator to remove the chlorine. Doesn’t that tell you something about the danger of drinking chlorine? Chlorine in tap water results in cancer and many other diseases, according to researchers worldwide” Pure water is a human being’s primary survival mechanism. Don’t take the importance of natural water lightly.

Chlorine is a highly efficient disinfectant, and it is added to public water supplies to kill disease-causing bacteria that the water or its transport pipes might contain.

“Chlorine has been hailed as the savior against cholera and various other waterborne diseases, and rightfully so,” says Steve Harrison, president of water filter maker Environmental Systems Distributing. “Its disinfectant qualities…have allowed communities and whole cities to grow and prosper by providing disease-free tap water to homes and industry.”

But Harrison says that all this disinfecting has not come without a price: Chlorine introduced into the water supply reacts with other naturally-occurring elements to form toxins called Trihalomethanes (THMs), which eventually make their way into our bodies. THMs have been linked to a wide range of human health maladies ranging from asthma and eczema to bladder cancer and heart disease. In addition,

Dr. Peter Montague of the Environmental Research Foundation cites several studies linking moderate to heavy consumption of chlorinated tap water by pregnant women with higher miscarriage and birth defect rates.

A recent report by the non-profit Environmental Working Group concluded that from 1996 through 2001, more than 16 million Americans consumed dangerous amounts of contaminated tap water. The report found that water supplies in and around

Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and the Bay Area in

California were putting the greatest number of people at risk, although 1,100 other smaller water systems across the country also tested positive for high levels of contaminants.

“Dirty water going into the treatment plant means water contaminated with chlorination by-products coming out of your tap,” said Jane Houlihan, EWG’s Research Director. “The solution is to clean up our lakes, rivers and streams, not just bombard our water supplies with chlorine.”

“Bladder cancer has been linked to chlorinated drinking water in an average of ten out of eleven studies. One of the studies in Ontario, conducted with funding from

Health Canada, found that fourteen to sixteen percent of bladder cancers in Ontario showed a direct correlation to drinking water containing high levels of chlorine by-products.

Chlorinated water has been linked to colon and rectal cancers in the studies, but the occurrences were not as common as those for bladder cancer.”

“In Canada at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, researchers found that high levels of Trihalomethanes, a by-product of chlorine in drinking water, significantly increased the risk of stillbirth”
“According to recent research in Europe, pregnant women in their first trimester who drink five or more glasses of chlorinated tap water a day may be at a much higher risk of miscarriage than women who drink non-chlorinated water”

Alternatives to Chlorine

Eliminating water pollution and cleaning up our watersheds are not going to happen overnight, but alternatives to chlorination for water treatment do exist. Dr. Montague reports that several European and Canadian cities now disinfect their water supplies with ozone instead of chlorine. Currently a handful of U.S. cities do the same, most notably Las Vegas, Nevada and Santa Clara, California.